Economic analysis of residential solar microgrids

From homeowner and investor perspective, integration of renewable energy with battery energy storage system (BESS) can have economic benefits. This paper presents the results of battery control in residential microgrid system using photovoltaic (PV) distributed energy resource (DER) in residential applications in Ottawa, Ontario. The battery flow is controlled on an hourly basis to optimize the cost saving from PV microgrid system under net metering and no-feedback utility policies. PV and battery sizes are designed with fixed budgets in a particular price year to match average annual residential electricity power consumption (kWh) and dollar amount of consumption (ĆD) in Ontario. A linear programing (LP) model is developed for PV microgrid system to solve for different scenarios, varying in different price years, net metering and no-feedback utility policies, combinations of different PV-battery size. The LP solution under net metering policy shows the battery flow is only dependent on time-of-use (TOU) rate, while solution under no-feedback policy depends on both TOU rates and utility supply and demand in the microgrid system. In addition, higher financial benefit is realized with larger battery size in the latter price year.